Tulane Law Forrester Fellow to clerk for Supreme Court Justice Sotomayor

Tulane Law Forrester Fellow and Professor Paulina Arnold has been selected to serve as a law clerk for U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor.

Arnold, who is in her first year of the two-year Tulane Forrester Fellowship, begins her term as a clerk in 2023. She currently teaches first-year law students in Legal Research & Writing.

“It will be an enormous honor to serve Justice Sotomayor and the Court,” Arnold says. “I am grateful for Tulane's support in this journey and am excited for my second year of teaching.”

Arnold received her undergraduate degree at Yale University and her JD cum laude in 2018 from Harvard Law School. Her research focuses on the intersection of immigration and prison law – including civil detention, habeas, and constitutional law. She is interested in the justifications for “nonpunitive” confinement and the government’s legal obligations when it incarcerates someone for administrative or policy reasons. Arnold’s most recent Article, How Immigration Detention Became Exceptional, is forthcoming in the Stanford Law Review.

Before joining Tulane, Arnold worked as a Staff Attorney at CASA, the largest grassroots immigrant advocacy organization in the Mid-Atlantic region. She previously clerked for the Hon. Paul A. Engelmayer of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York and the Hon. Cornelia T.L. Pillard of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit.

The Forrester Fellows at Tulane have gone on to hold prestigious careers in academia, in the courtroom and in Big Law. The Fellowship program is designed for individuals who plan to apply for tenure-track law faculty positions. Fellows teach in the first-year legal writing program and participate in scholarly activities at the law school, including faculty workshops.